Top-down cross-language activation in bimodal bilingual word recognition (ENGLISH)
Research with bilinguals in two spoken languages, i.e., unimodal bilinguals, has revealed that
both languages show some level of co-activation during listening, even in monolingual contexts.
Such cross-language activation is often taken to result from bottom-up activation of phonological
representations when participants hear words that sound similar in their two languages. This
raises the question whether cross-language activation would occur for languages with nonoverlapping phonological systems, i.e., a spoken language and a sign language. Morford et al.
(2011) recently showed cross-language activation between written words and signs for deaf ASLEnglish bilinguals, and findings by Shook and Marian (2012) suggest that hearing ASL-English
bilinguals experience cross-language activation of ASL during spoken word recognition in a
visual world paradigm. This paper reports two experiments that further investigated crosslanguage activation in hearing bimodal bilinguals. Experiment 1 aimed to replicate the results of
Shook and Marian (2012) and to relate the degree and time course of cross-language competition
to non-linguistic cognitive control abilities. Experiment 2 examined whether phonological
facilitation or semantic interference are observed when bilinguals name pictures in ASL while
English words are presented as auditory distractors.
For Experiment 1, participants listened to English words (e.g., “chair”) while looking at
displays with four pictures that included the target picture, a cross-language phonological
competitor (e.g., train, which is phonologically related to the ASL sign CHAIR), and two
unrelated pictures. Fluent ASL-English bilinguals (N = 20) fixated more on pictures of crosslanguage competitors than on unrelated pictures, suggesting parallel language activation and
replicating Shook and Marian (2012) with a larger sample and stimulus set. In a recent study with
unimodal bilinguals, Blumenfeld and Marian (under review) found significant correlations
between cross-language competitor activation and inhibition performance on a non-linguistic
cognitive control task, suggesting a direct link between linguistic competition and non-linguistic
competition resolution abilities. We are currently investigating whether bimodal bilinguals
exhibit a similar relationship, using the data from Experiment 1 and several cognitive control
tasks.
Experiment 2 was a picture-word interference task in which participants named pictures
in ASL (e.g., signing CHAIR) while English distractor words were presented over headphones
that were either 1) phonologically related to the target sign through the ASL translation (e.g.,
“train”), 2) semantically related to the target sign (e.g., “bed”), 3) translations of the target sign,
or 4) unrelated to the target sign. The same 20 hearing signers from Experiment 1 participated.
Similar to studies with unimodal bilinguals, naming latencies showed facilitation for translation
distractors and interference for semantically related distractors. Most importantly, facilitation was
observed for phonologically related distractors, showing that ASL production was speeded by
hearing English words whose translations were phonologically related to the target signs.
Together, these results provide converging evidence for robust cross-language activation
between a spoken and a signed language. The findings are not predicted by theories of bilingual
word recognition that emphasize bottom-up activation through a shared phonology as the main
source of cross-language activation and instead suggest an important role for top-down activation
from the conceptual and/or lexical levels.
Blumenfeld, H. K., & Marian, V. (2011). Bilingualism influences inhibitory control in auditory
comprehension. Cognition, 118(2), 245–257.
Blumenfeld, H. K., & Marian, V. (under review). Cognitive control and parallel language
activation during word recognition in bilinguals. Journal of Cognitive Psychology.
Morford, J. P., Wilkinson, E., Villwock, A., Piñar, P., & Kroll, J. F. (2011). When deaf signers
read English: Do written words activate their sign translations? Cognition, 118(2), 286–292.
Shook, A., & Marian, V. (2012). Bimodal bilinguals co-activate both languages during spoken
comprehension. Cognition, 124(3), 314–324.